When the New Year rolled around, I was ready to make my big comeback in poker. Gone were the days of overly careful bankroll management. I was ready to usher in a new era of bold play and higher stakes. I was ready to log as many hours as I could given my extremely tight schedule. I was to be king.Of course, reality set in around January 5th and things went very much back to normal. If anything good came out of my New Year's resolutions, it would be that I've finally made the jump to $100 NL and I hope to stay!

My goal for January was to multi-table two tables of $100 NL poker for 5 hours a week (i.e. 10 table hours per week). I fell 13 hours short of playing my planned 22 hours this past month. Although I would have preferred to play a little more than I did, I think I did alright considering that I also spent some quality time with my wife, kids, and my Xbox 360. I'll be aiming to play 21 hours in February.

I did alright in terms of bankroll for the month. I credit much of my win rate to the amount of poker-related reading and studying that I've done recently. No-Limit Hold'em: Theory and Practice and Professional No-Limit Hold'em: Volume 1 have both helped me immensely. I managed a win rate of 10 BB/100 over a small sample size of 1500 hands of $100 NL. Throw in rakeback and my win rate climbed to 13 BB/100.

According to the "plan", I was looking to earn $13/hour playing $100 NL (rakeback included). My target for January, then, was $286 (22 hrs. x $13) if I plan to stay on schedule for hitting the $200 NL tables in May. I actually earned $238 when all was said and done. This total includes $12 that I won while playing some drunken $50 NL that I played last week but excludes this month's rakeback and the little bit of money that I earned at InterPoker. I'm keeping my InterPoker winnings separate from the rest of my bankroll: that money is going towards buying my dream poker notebook computer! For those of you who like pretty pictures, here's a graph showing my January 2008 results:

I thought I'd check to see whether I was running hot or cold over the month. A win rate of 10 BB/100 is a little higher than I was hoping for and I wanted to know whether this was due primarily to outrageous fortune or not. Small sample size or not, this is still the type of stuff that I like to know. As you'll see below, I've been running a little cold but still quite normal. I'm prone to attribute many of the hands that I lose to my lack of skill as opposed to my opponents' sheer luck.

I'm quite interested to see what February will bring my way. If I continue to play solid short-stack poker, I'll look to begin increasing my table buy-in to the full amount (100 BB). My main goal for playing short-stacked was to allow myself to get accustomed to the higher stakes games and players: a goal that I believe I've accomplished in some part.

I'll be back later today or tonight with a new series of posts which will examine my poker game at its worst. I'll be focusing on those times where I completely misplayed my hand or played stupid donkey poker resulting in a completely avoidable loss of money or an undeserved lucky win. I'm hoping that examination of my game at its worst will help me improve my game by holding myself accountable for those errors directly under my control.

2 comments:

Yep.. I fell short of my goal also.. well kind of. My goal was to be a winning limit poker player. I think I ened up $4 for the month of many thousands of hands. I am going to post a recap over the weekend.

It is just crazy when I look at people like leatherass from stoxpoker who made 170K this month and here we are basically a little more than break even. Sigh!!

Well, heres to hoping the February will be better. I'm also looking forward to Pokertracker 3 to help further in identifying leaks.